DIY Pine Floors from 1×6 Pine Boards

The pale green 90’s carpet in the bedroom of our cabin was way too dirty and faded to keep. I love wood flooring instead of carpet any day, but I wanted to keep the budget low for this remodel. The price of finished wood flooring has recently spiked. So I shopped around, and in the end, decided to DIY some pine floors myself! It was the lowest-cost wood floor option I could find AND it turned out great. Let me show you how.

Here’s the old green carpet that had to go! This DIY pine floors project is part of a full room remodel you can find here.

Pine Boards:

To keep costs to a minimum, I decided to use 1×6 white pine boards. This room needed 40 twelve foot long boards or the equivalent. My local Lowes had a nice large selection of kiln-dried whitewood pine. I searched for the best boards and made it home with just enough.

Using kiln-dried boards is key here! You want the boards to be dimensionally stable and not prone to warping over time. Buying them kiln-dried will mean that you simply need to acclimate the wood to your space for a few days and can install them without much worry of warping, assuming you allow for an expansion gap! More on that later.

How to DIY Tongue & Groove Pine Boards:

I got the boards home and started processing them on a router table to add tongue and groove edges (T&G). The T&G will help lock the boards together and prevent relative vertical movement between the boards.

Here are the boards about mid-way through the T&G install. I don’t have a proper workshop (as of yet!) so I simply set up a makeshift work table and made what I had work.

My husband had bought the router table a few years back because he likes to buy tools, lol. It was sitting in our small shed, unused. So this project was a good use for it. He found it on Amazon here. I bought the T&G router bits off Amazon too. They worked great once I got them adjusted to the proper height.

Don’t let this intimidate you! This was my first time using a router table. My only instruction was from the instruction manual and some YouTube videos. The T&G does not have to be perfect by any means. If you’re thinking of trying this, I’d say just go for it. Use some scrap boards to test things out first. Then you’re on your way.

If you don’t want to route your own boards, but still want to go with a low-cost pine option, you could buy unfinished pine floors from a local flooring store such as Lumber Liquidators. I almost went that route but the flooring reviews noted a lot of warped boards. I decided to give the router table a try.

Bottom Kerf Pine Boards:

If you buy wood flooring from a supplier, you’ll likely see the bottom side of the boards have grooves or kerfs made along the length of the boards. This helps keep the boards from expanding, particularly along the bottom, which could cause the boards to “cup” or bow upward.

I decided to do a really quick and dirrrrty DIY kerf by making a few runs with the circular saw along the bottom of boards set to about 1/8″ depth. Here is picture of my processed T&G plus kerfed board. I’ll be honest and say that I don’t know for sure if this really helps, but it made me feel better about things.

Pine Floor Underlayment:

Before installing the pine boards, I installed Quiet Walk underlayment. This product is labeled for use under a floating floor install. However, I installed a nail-down floor like we’ll do here a few years prior and used this underlayment without issue. My local Lumber Liquidators told me it was fine, so I went with it. It’s been great. I simply stapled the Quiet Walk to the floor sheathing below at sensible intervals.

I like that it adds some sound dampening and a tiny bit of insulation. Here is the installed Quiet Walk. You can see I’ve already removed some walls and painted. More on those room updates here if you’re interested.

Pine Floors DIY Install:

I did some research on wood flooring and found that wood typically expands and contracts due to seasonal moisture changes perpendicular to grain. This means that the movement of the wood floors is mostly perpendicular to grain, or perpendicular to the board length. Also, because of the diagonal flooring nails installed on the tongue side only, most of the flooring movement acts in the direction of the tongue. So, if you start laying the flooring one end of the room with the tongues all facing one direction, the expansion will get pushed to one side of the room. That’s not good! The expansion might be more than your expansion gap and cause cupping or bowing of your floors. It’s better to balance the expansion by starting the boards in the middle of the room. Then flip the tongue direction for the 2nd half. Let me show you what I mean.

To start the boards in the middle of the room, I needed something to act as a backing so that I could start the flooring boards in the middle of the room. I grabbed a piece of old baseboard, screwed it in place after many measurements to get in centered as best as possible in a wonkily-framed room with no true 90 degrees anywhere, ha! We just do our best. Here is the starting row.

I should note that even though I bought the straightest 12 foot long boards I could find, they were not perfect and would have taken a lot of wrestling to lay full-length. So I cut boards to more manageable lengths and laid out my plan for the pine floors. Here is my plan with color-coded board lengths. The uncolored lines are 12 foot boards. I still tried to use a few full-length straight ones! This plan avoids placing joints too close to each other, avoids a treaded “H” pattern, and avoids stair-stepping as best I could figure.

Here’s a progress photo and a look at all my install tools.

I bought a DeWalt pneumatic flooring nailer from Home Depot for about $260 on a separate flooring project a year or so before, so I pulled it out of the tool shed for this job. You’ll need a pressure tank to provide the nailing pressure. With the 3/4 inch thick boards, I used 2 inch 16 gage steel flooring cleats in the nailer and placed them at about 6 inches on center when installing each board.

Flooring Direction Flip:

Since I started in the middle of the room with the flooring install to balance the expansion, I need to flip the direction of the tongue to finish the second-half. To do that, I filled the exposed groove end with a wooden dowel, shaped to fit, called a “Slip Tongue.” You can find these pre-made in the flooring section at Home Depot. I used wood glue to hold them in place before running the nailer on the board with the slip tongue. This center board is the only board that gets nailed on both sides since it has tongues on both sides. Here is a close-up of the slip tongue and the butted grooves of the boards so that I could switch directions.

Flooring Install Close to the Wall:

Continue with the flooring nailer as long as you can. It’s fast and easy. However, at some point, you’ll get close enough to the wall that the nailer just won’t fit. At that point, I simply switched to 6d x 2 inch finish nails through pre-drilled holes. If I had enough space, I installed nails through the tongue at an angle, just like the flooring nailer shown here. I hammered the nails with a regular hammer until I got close to the wood. To avoid damaging the pine floors with my hammer, I used a nail setter placed on the nail head, and hammered the top of the nail setter instead of the pine flooring. Nice.

The nails for the last row of boards couldn’t be angled through the tongue, so I simply nailed vertically and tried to keep the spacing unform since these nail holes are visible. You can fill them with wood-filler to blend them in, but they are still visible if you look closely.

Notice in the two photos above that the bottom of the drywall stops above the floor level? I actually cut the drywall up slightly with an oscillating multitool to provide an extra expansion gap for the wood flooring. That way, I can install the flooring within 3/8 inch of the wall and not need a quarter round on the baseboard. This is a work-around to provide enough expansion and keep the clean simple baseboard look. Win-win!

Here is the full room with pine floors freshly installed! It took about 4 partial days for me to place these boards myself.

Floor Sanding:

Before finishing, I needed to give the flooring a good sand. There were wood grade stamps and colored chalk lines from the lumber yard visible on the boards. While that is kind of a cool look, it’s not the one I was going for here.

Generally, your best bet is to simply rent a floor sander from a local hardware or big box store. Unfortunately, I’m a bit out in the boons and, I kid you not, could not find one within reasonable distance to rent. Hmm…so I dusted off my 5″ orbrital sander, bought a lot of different grades of sanding pads, hooked the sander up to a shop vac and got to work. Here I am on Sanding Day, one of many, lol.

A few words to the wise if you’re going to do this:

1. Consider putting up drop cloth or plastic over doors or openings to other rooms to stop the dust. Even with the shop vac, it gets EVERYWHERE!
2. Wear a really good dust mask. The one I am wearing is the best I could find with a P100 rating. It’s really comfortable as far as masks go.
3. Invest in some comfortable knee pads. Not the cheap ones. I wore my cheap ones out and limped around a few days before splurging on some gel knee pads and celebrating in their awesomeness.

I started with 50 grit sanding pads on the tough grade stamps and worked my way up to a nice smooth 220 grit finish over the floor. It took hours. This was definitely the hardest part of the flooring install, at least mentally. If you do this, hopefully you’ll have something on your mind that you want to think about because you can’t really listen to anything. You’ll be alone with your thoughts and the sander for some time. It does get kind of meditative! Keep going. You can do it.

Tung Oil Pine Floor Finish:

I wanted to go with a natural finish and decided to give tung oil a try. The online reviews seemed great. Tung oil is a natural oil from a tung tree that cures as it dries and gives the wood a nice warm, natural finish. That all sounded amazing to me, so I ordered it online with a 50/50 mix with citrus solvent from The Real Milk Paint Co. The solvent helps the oil penetrate into the wood. Also, if you get any scrapes or scuffs in the finish, you can simply apply more tung oil. No need to sand down the finish and start anew.

Here is the first application of the tung oil mix. You can see it warms the white pine up a bit but was not too yellow. I was really happy with look.

Here is the full floor area with the tung oil finish freshly applied. You can see a little sheen as it is drying, but the tung oil dries to a matte finish. I was on-board and happy with this look. Be aware that it does smell pretty strongly like oranges for some time as it cures.

Now for some bad news. 🙁 Weeks passed and the floors still smelled like citrus. They felt dry to the touch, but if I stepped on them with indoor shoes, they grabbed any dirt off the soles. Here is a photo where you can see faint dirty shoe prints. In my waiting for the tung oil to cure, I went ahead and installed the baseboards. At least 3 weeks passed. The tung oil should have cured in a few days!

Hmmm…so I did a deep dive on Google. Finally it dawned on my as to why these floors hadn’t cured yet: they were too freaking cold! This flooring install was done in December/early January with 45 degree F days and 20 degree F nights. I did have the heater in the home running this whole time, BUT the crawlspace directly below this flooring is not heated. The crawlspace is well-vented to the outside and there is no flooring insulation in this old cabin. So the flooring never warmed up enough to properly cure. Bummer!

I decided that I had two options moving forward:

1. Wait until Spring/Summer for these floors to cure. They’re lovely, outside of the whole attracting dirt issue at the moment.
2. Sand away the tung oil as best I can and refinish with something other.

Sadly, I didn’t want to wait, so I bit the bullet and got my sanding gear back out. On to Sanding Round 2!

Flooring Finish – For Real This Time:

After nearly reaching Nirvana from many many long hours of sanding solitude, the floors finally felt like fresh pine again. Woohoo! I like the look of fresh pine, and I wanted to keep it simple. So instead of the tung oil, I opted for the next best thing: a polyurethane finish over this white pine. Here is a photo what I used from Home Depot. This photo has some *spoilers* as it is taken in the kitchen. I went a different route with the kitchen floors. More on those floors to come, but you can find the kitchen remodel here.

I applied the finish per the directions on the can, and it worked great. The matte sheen makes it look even more like simple pine flooring. Here are my polyurethane-finished DIY pine floors!

Oh hey, got the TV on the wall and painted the window sills white. Getting ready to use this space! Anyway, what do you think of these DIY pine floors? Let me know if you install your own. I’d love to see them.